Technologies associated with mobile terminals are being rapidly developed and standardized, and such technologies are increasing transmissions and receptions of various contents among mobile terminals and network entities.
According to recent standardization documents of Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a content identify manager (CIM) can be provided to identify various contents associated with mobile services.
Generally, a CIM, which is a network entity, generates content IDs for contents associated with terminals or services. In the related art, it is possible for two separately contents that are the same or substantially the same to have different content IDs. For instance, if a first user saves a picture A and sends to a second user who in turn saves the same picture A in a different format (e.g., different picture size, compression, etc.), then the CIM calculates and assigns different content IDs to the same content, picture A. As a result, the picture A of the first user and the picture A of the second user will have content IDs that are different from each other even through the same picture A (same content) is involved.
This creates various problems and limitations. Because the CIM alone generates content IDs, the CIM may be overloaded with the task of calculating content IDs and securely managing the content IDs in view of a large number of contents that are being exchanged in networks. Calculating different content IDs for the same or almost same contents by the CIM increases the network load. Moreover, it becomes more difficult to analyze such content IDs and to properly associate each content with a correct content ID. In addition, it may not be possible to have an effective global policy for standardizing the use and management of contents and content IDs.